Coosje van Bruggen (b. 1942, Groningen, The Netherlands, d. 2009, Los Angeles) was a sculptor, art historian, and critic who collaborated extensively with her husband, the artist Claes Oldenburg. Throughout her career, van Bruggen held positions at various institutions including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Sonsbeek 71, Artforum; and the Yale University School of Art. She also authored numerous art historical books. Van Bruggen’s first collaboration with Oldenburg was in 1976, when Trowel I, originally shown at Sonsbeek 71, was rebuilt and relocated to the sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. In 1978, van Bruggen moved to New York, where she continued to work with Oldenburg. Together, the pair executed more than forty large-scale projects, which have been sited in various urban surroundings in Europe, Asia, and the U.S.
Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929, Stockholm, d. 2022, New York) moved to New York City in 1956, where he established himself as a pivotal figure in American art. Oldenburg’s initial interest in Happenings, performance art, and installation—including such seminal works as The Street (1960) and The Store (1961)—soon evolved into a concentration on single sculptures. Working with ordinary, everyday objects, he went on to develop “soft” sculpture and fantastic proposals for civic monuments. In 1969, Oldenburg took up fabrication on a large scale with Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks installed on the Yale University campus. From 1976 until 2009 he worked in partnership with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, executing countless large-scale projects for various public settings around the world. Oldenburg was honored with a one-person exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969, and with a retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995. His work is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
